Another Quote

Sorry once again for a long quote but there’s nobody on this blog who’d read the book of their own will, and I like the quote so much that I could have written it myself in these exact words:

Why do we tax capital at half the rate of labor? Why is it fair that some inherited-money loser living off the interest from an investment portfolio he didn’t create pays half the taxes per dollar that you do? You get up every morning to go to work. He stays home, smokes weed, and watches online porn. You get hit twice as hard on April 15. He’s being rewarded, while you’re being punished. Is he twice as necessary as you are? Does he contribute twice as much to America? Maybe he does. Maybe the people who wrote the tax code could explain precisely how. Maybe not. Either way, you can see how a conversation like that might quickly spin out of control and become a threat to the existing order. Better not to have it in the first place. Better to change the subject away from economics entirely.

Capital. . . labor. . . Why, why do I have to look on the political right for somebody to make an easily accessible, plainly argued, and jargon-free argument about this? Not everybody can or will want to read Bauman and Co. Somebody needs to popularize these ideas. And people are popularizing the deeply Marxist Bauman. But they are somehow mysteriously all way to the right of anybody I have even met in my whole life.

I wouldn’t have to read all this stuff if somebody else were doing it. But they aren’t.

The first and the last paragraphs of your comment are in direct contradiction to each other. Deficits will skyrocket if taxes are slashed without anything to compensate for that. If you care about deficits, you can’t want lower taxes. Which one would you pick? 🙂

There is no contradiction — the deficit will not rise significantly if government outlays are also commensurately reduced (or nearly so) — look, government outlays could be selectively reduced by 1/3 or more overnite and the average working, taxpaying person would not notice it one bit.

I’m concerned about deficits to the extent they affect the value of the money I get by selling my labor.

You did not answer the question about why the government must sell debt in order to run a deficit — or if you think inter-generational government indebtedness is immoral.

A famous quote from Thomas Edison:

“If the Nation can issue a dollar bond it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money broker collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%. Whereas the currency, the honest sort provided by the Constitution pays nobody but those who contribute in some useful way. It is absurd to say our Country can issue bonds and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the People.”

Suggestion: search for the Corbett Report video “Century of Enslavement” about the Federal Reserve — spend the time to watch it.

You seem concerned about relative taxation of “capital” vs wages — are you also concerned about the fact that a growing share of the tax on wages goes to service government indebtedness?

Eisenhower tried to warn us about the ‘military industrial complex’ — we should have listened to him.